Watch Microsoft's new AI bot struggle to interpret famous works of art

Here's CaptionBot's take on Dalí.
Microsoft
Microsoft has bounced back from its "Tay" bot disaster, and released a new artificial-intelligence experiment to the world.

CaptionBot is a bot that will automatically create captions for any photos you upload, and is the latest in a series of periodic releases from Microsoft's AI division to show off its technical prowess in novel ways.

Here's how it works. You can upload photos to it, and it will tell you what it thinks is in them using natural language. "I think it's a baseball player holding a bat on a field," it says in response to one example photo.

We decided to have some fun with CaptionBot, and asked it to interpret some famous works of art. The results were sometimes hilarious, sometimes accurate, and sometimes just plain bizarre.

Here's what happened when we put CaptionBot through an impromptu Art History course.